The European Perl Conference in Amsterdam

Aug 21, 2017

It’s been just over a week since I came back from Amsterdam, where I went
to attend The European Perl Conference1. This is the second time I attend,
and the first time I give a talk2, and I wanted to put down in writing
some of my impressions.

Joining a community

Like in previous years, the conference was really great, and it reinforced
an idea that has been incredibly illuminating and transformative: that
programming is a social practice. In brief: if you are coding alone, you are
doing it wrong.

For the longest time I wrote my code in solitary. I got a lot of help online,
of course, and from some of those around me who were more experienced than I
was. But my circle was always small, and most of the code I wrote I did on
and for my own.

Throughout my years studying Phonetics, I went to a number of conferences,
in different countries, and with different target audiences. They were all
very different, and in every case I think I learnt something. But I don’t
think I ever came away from one of them feeling like I was a part of the
community the conference was for.

For some reason, the Perl conferences I’ve been to (including smaller
meetups and workshops, and even the occasional pub outing) have been
different. And I don’t know if this is how technical conferences are in
general, or if this is because of the community of the Perl programming
language in particular.

But the truth is it took very little for me to feel involved, and to feel
like I was a part of something bigger. And I’ve made efforts to get more
closely involved, including participating in this year’s Pull Request
Challenge.

This year’s conference

If last year I was trying to find my place and learn the ropes, this year I
tried to meet people and participate a little bit more of the so-called
Hallway Track, and to take a little bit of a more active role.

This included having the chance to meet Paul Cochrane, who maintains
App::CLI, the module I was assigned to for this month’s PRC. And
it was great to be able to bounce ideas off him and to discuss some of the
changes I wanted to include.

He was also very good with the feedback to my contributions, and taught me
some very useful lessons about what to write in a good commit message, and
why they are important.

And Ruth Holloway gave a touching closing talk on
empathy, which really served to stress the point about how people is
the most difficult (and important) part of programming (and I guess all other
human endeavours). Her talk was particularly welcome in the context of the
whole “diversity” memo fiasco.

Other highlights

There were other aspects of the conference which I particularly enjoyed:

I’m already looking forward to the London Perl Workshop (and I managed to
coax two of my non-Perl friends to come as well… fingers crossed!). And
to the conferences coming after that.

It’s not entirely clear to me how to call it at this point. Some
people still call it YAPC::EU, as in “Yet Another Perl Conference”,
which I personally like because it has a particularly Perlish ring to
it. At the conference they were calling it TPCiA, as in “The Perl
Conference in Amsterdam” (since The Perl Conference is apparently
the American one). But I’ve since started seeing TEPC, as in the title
of this post. So I guess I’ll go with that one. ↩

That said, last year, when I went for the first time, I did give a
lightning talk on writing software in academia, and how I thought that
the values of the Free Software movement are allied to those of the
scientific community. You can see that talk on YouTube. ↩

I’ll update the video links to the talks when they are officially made
available by the conference organisers. ↩